Anyone with a 300w power supply that is pushing alot of juice, multiple hard drives, ect. Post your system specs and maybe we can get rid of these rumors that you need a 400w+ power supply to run a high performance rig.

My geek pursuits have taken me far off into the deep-end, but your benefit. I'll be getting a clamp-on DC ammeter soon, so I can measure DC current draw from the IDE connectors. Then we can figure out our true PSU requirements!

Stay tuned!

Mike, we could incorporate this device into future reviews/article. What do you think?

My geek pursuits have taken me far off into the deep-end, but your benefit. I'll be getting a clamp-on DC ammeter soon, so I can measure DC current draw from the IDE connectors. Then we can figure out our true PSU requirements!

Stay tuned!

Mike, we could incorporate this device into future reviews/article. What do you think?

Sounds fun. Play with it & see how well it correlates to other data, then sure, why not?

Make sure you get a good PSU. A well made PSU will push well-over its rated power, as I'm sure is the case with the Antec TruePower 300 above (sheesh!).

Check out Tom's Hardware's PSU round-up: they measure the "breaking point" of PSU's (where they will auto-power-down) as compared to their rated max power. The best performer in their estimation, a Verax 300W, actually pushed 370W.

After reading that, I did some digging about the best rated PSUs according to Tom's (Verax, Conrad, Herolchi) and and found out that Verax PSU's are made by Fortron, as are Conrad, which also markets as Sparkle here in the states. They also make AOpen's PSUs. So a Sparkle FSP300 is the same product as a Verax FSP300 (which Tom's reviewed), is the same as a Conrad FSP300. Similarly, what Tom's calls "Herolchi" is actually Heroichi, and is marketed in the states as Compucase (as is any other PSU maker that uses HEC in their PSUs). I'm running an HEC-350LDT -- oh, that's important! Only get an HEC with a "T" at the end. It's for "turbo," and means that it is ATX12V compliant (P4 ready).

_________________"Just because I work for the federal government doesn't mean that I'm an expert on cockroaches." -- F"S"M

Last edited by jamoore9 on Tue Feb 04, 2003 2:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Anyone buying a PSU for a gaming rig who has an eye on future upgrades needs to keep in mind that the recent history of graphics card upgrades suggest that you be generous in providing a power cushion - a 9700 Pro has a minimum requirement of a 300 watt PSU, and depending on what source you go by, the Geforce FX needs a minimum of 300 or 350 watts. Throw in a 360 gig RAID array, 1 gig ram, 3 gigahertz P4, and a few other drives, and while a 300 watt PSU may run your box, you can probably forget about stable overclocking, and you'll probably need to buy a new PSU for your next upgrade. Some cheaper 300 watt supplies don't provide enough juice on the +12 rail to safely run a current state-of-the-art P4 system - see Tom's review. And a year or two from now gaming GPUs will probably be guzzling 120+ watts...

Re Schnee's system - valuable information there. It should be kept in mind that a current high-end 3d card like a 9700Pro or a Geforce FX is drawing 30+ or so more watts than a 9000; and if you were to array a pair of the new Barracuda 7200.7's rather than the WDs, you would be looking at an extra 19.2 watts max draw on the drives. Plus any significant overclocking can add significantly to your load - all those extra watts being dissipated as heat.

Maybe 200w on average use, but not on momentary max draw - see the Tom's Hardware website for the calculations on components.... Granted, you may never hit such extremes as 90-100% on all components simultaneously, but if you want to be certain of avoiding any instabilities caused by voltage drops, you are better off playing it safe. Check the VIA forums for many cases of problems caused by weak 250- and 300-watt PSUs - there are endless litanies about lockups/looping that turn out to be caused by low and fluctuating voltage, especially for the overclocker. And there is also the issue of what each rail delivers relative to your component loads - looking at the total number of watts can create a misleading impression that "everything's fine".

...i haven't had any problems yet, it's dead silent as well, can i ask for more? i'd say 400w would only be needed for high end raid setups or dual processors...

Looking at your setup (which is very close to what I am planning), and working from Tomshardware figures and the AMD "100% CPU load plus 80% of all other loads" rule, you're actually past the 15A max load the Nexus is rated for on the +12v rail... better not try any overclocking!

Unfortunately, an "upgrade" to most quiet 400 watt PSUs won't help - most of these units (including the SilenX) put all the extra power on the 3.3 and 5 volt rails for some reason, leaving the 12 volt rail at 15A . The only ones I have found that seem to buck this trend are the 400/460w "Ultra-quiet" PSUs from quietpc.com.

I'm not arguing with the general consensus here that in most cases, virtually all of the time even heavily loaded systems will run well on a good 300 watt PSU. But from problems reported on other forums, PSUs that even momentarily get close to their limits are much more likely to experience voltage drops on their rails, which can cause instabilities (lockups, looping, etc.), especially for overclockers. That 30 millisecond spike in demand every 8 hours, if it causes your system to crash, is the one spike you want to be prepared for. To give but one example from forums, some Intel 845PE chipset motherboard owners have reported problems cold booting with nominally "OK" PSUs because the momentary draw on drive spinup etc. is just too much for the PSU to reliably support at the right voltages. I for one intend to err on the side of caution in PSU choice, as I will be doing some mild overclocking...

A related point for overclockers to consider is that some of these very quiet 1-fan PSUs push so little air that case temps (already raised by o'clocking) could rise enough that thermostatically-controlled CPU heatsink fans are triggered to run faster and louder, or a need could arise for more case fans, thereby obviating the noise reduction benefit of the PSU.

Stable for the past week+ running 24/7 playing c&c generals or prime 95 most of that time.
I will add another 120 gig hd, cdrom, and a front 120 mm fan soon.
3,5,12 V fairly stable according to mbm. The main reason to go to a 400 watt is the larger heatsink on the mosfets as show in the other threads. There seem to be more components inside too on the 400 watts. Your sysem might never need the extra juice, but the psu will run cooler, extending its life.

I have had problems with my 250W Q-Technology ATX1125B power supply not able to support my newly upgraded system. Symptoms are program crashes, system lockups, and system won't post (stops before executing memory testing). I have unplugged my SCSI Plextor PX-32TSI UltraPlex and underclocked my system to avoid these problems for now.

The PSU was installed in 1999, perhaps age has derated its capacity somewhat. Nevertheless, since 250W is borderline I don't want to upgrade to a 300W. I would like to continue upgrading my system including increasing the speed again and getting a DVD. I have no confidence 300W would be enough, and only wish to upgrade the PSU once.

"National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the IRS .... and the cost accounting of the Pentagon."
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It'll be interesting to see how long it takes until pairs or triads of power supplies start becoming common in home computers.

I have an old Dell PowerEdge 6300 server with three power supplies (accepts 4 Pentium II 450 Xeons, up to 8 Ultra160 hotswap 15,000 RPM hard drives, etc etc). It requires two of the power supplies to run, but will distribute the power evenly across three, and tolerates a sudden power failure (or circuit failure) on any one of the three supplies.

I can see power supply pairs or triads happening in home computers once people are buying 800 watt power supplies for their home computer/furnace..

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